Code/Tea/Etc... : .NET General

This blog has moved... notice #2...

Duncanma — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 05:17:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma

following the 3 leaf model when they moved, I thought I should post this notice a couple of times...

This blog has moved...

Duncanma — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:11:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net

The first post over there shows the app that I wrote last night and then used to copy all of my posts and categories over from this blog to the new location... I'll post the code for that app at some point, as boring as it is...

Stuck on a problem opening vbproj or csproj files...

Duncanma — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 10:18:00 GMT

On my home dev box I couldn't seem to open any of my projects (VB or C#), and whenever I tried I got this useful error;

The application for project 'C:\Documents and Settings\Duncanma\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\ConsoleApplication1\ConsoleApplication1.vbproj' is not installed.

Make sure the application for the project type (.vbproj) is installed.

All I could find on the internet was the suggestion that I must have just C# Standard installed and therefore didn't have VB available... but that wasn't it (I have VS.NET Enterprise installed)... I was basically out of luck until I finally found this newsgroup discussion through .NET 247 (link). Even though I had completely uninstalled VS.NET and reinstalled, I followed the reinstall instructions from Mark Smith in that newsgroup post and it worked perfectly. It is possible that uninstalling and reinstalling the .NET Framework SDK would have done this for me as well (I wasn't doing that in my normal reinstalls, I was only dealing with VS.NET 2003), but Mark's solution was easy to try out and it worked...

Anyway, if you run into this problem... try following those steps and see if that helps!! If that fails, I'd considering calling PSS directly.

"Express Paint" article up...

Duncanma — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:56:00 GMT

This article, by John Kennedy, discusses the creation of an image editing application completely built with C# Express Edition.

ExpressPaint
Summary: Use C# Express to create an image processing application that's ideal for putting the final touch to your digital photographs. This program is easy to expand with your own unique touches. (6 printed pages)

Enjoy!

Generics in VB 2005 Article now live on MSDN...

Duncanma — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 04:40:00 GMT

Defining and Using Generics in Visual Basic 2005

Harish Kantamneni
Visual Basic Team
Microsoft Corporation
July 2004

Summary: Provides an overview of the generics feature in Visual Basic 2005, and explains the basic concepts involved in defining and using generics and their usefulness to the Visual Basic developer.

Webcast today on the new features of VB 2005...

Duncanma — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 17:39:00 GMT

In case you didn't notice this on the /vbasic home page...

MSDN Webcast: New Features for Visual Basic 2005 Developers
Friday, July 02, 2004 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
In this webcast, you'll learn about the new features in the language, and in the Visual Studio .NET environment, including the My namespace, IntelliTasks, new exception-handling features, data binding support, generics, operator overloading and more.

Cool new MSDN TV (on creating a RSS reader that runs as a tool window in VS)

Duncanma — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 07:31:00 GMT

Building Tools Using the Visual Studio Automation Model
In this episode, Craig Skibo uses the Visual Studio .NET 2003 automation model to build a tool window hosted within Visual Studio that allows you to read blog postings.

Another new article posted yesterday... "What's New In Help for VB 2005"

Duncanma — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:53:00 GMT

What's New in Help for Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1
Find out about the newest Help features in Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1, including distinguishing Visual Basic from other languages, more task-oriented topics, and an emphasis on code examples.

Operator Overloading in VB 2005

Duncanma — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:21:00 GMT

Matthew Gertz, Dev Lead for the VB Compiler, Editor & Debugger team has written an article on operator overloading in Visual Basic 2005...

Operator Overloading In Visual Basic 2005
Operator Overloading, new to Visual Basic 2005, simplifies the use and development of complex types by allowing you to specify your own implementation for standard operations such as addition and subtraction.

A sneak preview of Visual Basic 2005 (article) is up on MSDN...

Duncanma — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 22:13:00 GMT

This new article from Ken Getz provides an overview of many of the new features in Visual Basic 2005, including "My", "Edit and Continue", "AutoCorrect", "Just My Code" and more...

Check it out here

Ended the "Most anticipated release" poll...

Duncanma — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 05:43:00 GMT

And (hopefully the formatting will work out ok in the blog) here are the results :)

What release are you most excited about?

Halo 2:

(20.7%)

Visual Studio .NET 2005:

(46.6%)

SQL Server 2005:

(8.6%)

Longhorn:

(15.5%)

None of the above:

(8.6%)

Total votes: 444

(Listening To: Aftermath [The Tea Party / Transmission])

Visual Basic Power Pack Article Up on MSDN

Duncanma — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 23:06:00 GMT

If you follow other people's blogs, then you've probably heard about the Power Pack by now, but I'm happy to annouce that the overview article (complete with pictures!!) is available on MSDN!

Check it out by clicking here!

More playing with ASP.NET

Duncanma — Sat, 12 Jun 2004 07:58:00 GMT

As with my earlier messing around with a poll, I took a concept from the www.asp.net site today and made my own "CheckDotNet.aspx" page. The one on www.asp.net only checks for the .NET Framework 1.0 or better, so I modified the logic to detect 1.1 and 1.0 as two distinct cases... recommending an upgrade for no framework or 1.0, and returning "Framework Found" if you have 1.1 already.

http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/tools/checkdotnet.aspx

Difficult? Nope... nothing too impressive...

Useful? I have no idea, but I thought it was worth putting up. The page has only one bit of code, the load event handler (and yes, I know I could have overriden OnLoad... but the code I started with was using Page_Load, so I just went with it)...

     Sub Page_Load(sender as Object, e as EventArgs)
        Dim clrVersion as Version = Request.Browser.ClrVersion
        If clrVersion.Major > 0 Then
         If clrVersion.Minor > 0 Then
             aOkPanel11.Visible = True
         Else
             aOkPanel1.Visible = True
         End If
        Else
            downloadPanel.Visible = True
        End If
     End Sub

aOkPanel11 on my page contains the text to show if the user has the 1.1 version of the Framework... aOkPanel1 is shown if they have 1.0 only, and downloadPanel appears if they have no Framework at all.

Ouch... I guess I was porting/modifying that code way too quickly... goofed up the logic in a bunch of ways (thanks for the comments folks!)... at the risk of trying again and still screwing it up... here is another try at that routine;

    Sub Page_Load(sender as Object, e as EventArgs)
        Dim clrVersion as Version = Request.Browser.ClrVersion
        if clrVersion.Major = 1 Then
         if clrVersion.Minor > = 1 Then
             '1.1 or better, but less than 2.0
             aOkPanel11.Visible = true
         ElseIf clrVersion.Minor = 0 Then
             'only 1.0
             aOkPanel1.Visible = true
         end if
        elseif clrVersion.Major > 1 Then
            '2.x or greater... could have its own panel
            'but showing the 1.1 panel is probably the next
            'best thing...
            aOkPanel11.Visible = true
        else
            'anything else... should display for 
            '< 1.0 or nothing...
            downloadPanel.Visible = true
        end if
    
    end sub

Also, in the html of the aOkPanel11, which can appear for the .NET Framework 1.1 or greater... I changed the text to reflect this possibility and added

<%Response.Write(Request.Browser.ClrVersion)%>

hopefully, this 'release' works better than the last one :)

Whidbey docs up on MSDN's lab servers...

Duncanma — Sun, 06 Jun 2004 05:42:00 GMT

Check out this link to go right to the VB section... lots of great info in there... or check out the C# section here.

(found via the VSTO2 blog...)

Note that this is not a prototype of the next version of MSDN... it is intended to be consumed by the internal browser in Visual Studio... so the non-IE issues mentioned in the comments and the lack of index/search/etc... are really non-issues considering how this material is intended to be used. I post it only to give a little bit more Whidbey information to folks who haven't installed the Community previews.... using it through a normal browser may not provide the greatest experience at this point :)

Early & Adopter fill you in on "Application Level Events"

Duncanma — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 07:47:00 GMT

The 3 Leaf guys, (well probably just one of them... but who knows which one), talk about "Application Level Events" in Whidbey

Here's a code snippet to illustrate what they are talking about... something that I like to think of as "Global.asa" (I haven't done a lot of web work since ASP) for Windows applications...

Namespace My
    Partial Friend Class MyApplication
        Private Sub MyApplication_Shutdown(ByVal Sender As Object, _
            ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.ShutdownEventArgs) _
            Handles Me.Shutdown
        End Sub

        Private Sub MyApplication_StartUp(ByVal sender As Object, _
            ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.StartupEventArgs) _
            Handles Me.Startup
        End Sub

        Private Sub MyApplication_StartupNextInstance(ByVal Sender As Object, _
            ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.StartupNextInstanceEventArgs) _
            Handles Me.StartupNextInstance
        End Sub

        Private Sub MyApplication_UnhandledException(ByVal sender As Object, _
            ByVal e As System.Threading.ThreadExceptionEventArgs) _
            Handles Me.UnhandledException
        End Sub

    End Class

End Namespace

Make sure you check out the whole post for a pretty screenshot :)